Some say court ruling recognizes progress, others fear clock set back

Jun. 26, 2013

Lottie Gibson remembers hearing her grandmother’s stories about living in slavery as a young girl.

And the Greenville County councilwoman remembers going to great lengths to cast her ballot in 1948, the first election in which African Americans in Greenville were able to vote since Reconstruction.

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday to strike down the part of the 1965 law that put South Carolina and other Southern states under the watchful eye of the federal government to make sure they don’t trample on the voting rights of minorities, Gibson and other local black leaders fear the clock has been set back a half century.

Other political figures, including Republican Gov. Nikki Haley, praised the Supreme Court, saying it recognized that South Carolina is no longer a state that can’t be trusted to do what’s right.

“She understands better than anyone how South Carolina has changed for the better -- and that’s thanks in no small part to the fact that she, and members of the General Assembly, have fought to strengthen the integrity of our electoral process and make sure more, and not fewer, South Carolinians have access to the ballot box.”

Local black leaders fear that the centerpiece of what they fought for during the civil rights movement -- the unfettered right to make their voice heard in the political process -- has been gutted.

“I know there’s gonna be discrimination,” said Gibson, the widow of a former national NAACP president. “I just hope that we will have the kinds of people that we work with to identify it and be able to work to correct it.”

She and others who participated in the marches and protests of the 1960’s have long looked to the federal government as their protector, their best hope of being treated fairly.

And now they feel betrayed.

“Where do we run to now?” asked the Rev. J.M. Flemming, president of the Greenville NAACP. “You can’t run back to the same Supreme Court.”

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U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said the decision acknowledges the realities of South Carolina politics in 2013.

“Voting is a fundamental right guaranteed to all United States citizens. I will continue to do everything in my power to ensure elections are free and fair for every South Carolinian,” the Seneca Republican said in a statement.

“Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was a necessary tool to preserve voting rights, but due to the reform and advances in South Carolina election law, it is no longer necessary,” Graham said.

“The Supreme Court noted this tremendous progress in South Carolina’s electoral system and it was the underpinning of their decision. I concur with the court that our state has made tremendous progress.

“The Supreme Court decision now puts South Carolina on equal footing with every other state in the nation. As a South Carolinian, I’m glad we will no longer be singled out and treated differently than our sister states.”

U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan of Laurens called the decision “a win for fairness, South Carolina and the rule of law.”

“The pre-clearance requirement forced South Carolina to spend millions of dollars to defend a photo identification requirement for voting that had already been ruled constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court,” the Republican 3rd District representative said in a statement.

“The court’s ruling will hopefully end the practice of treating states differently and recognizes that we live in 2013, not the 1960’s.”

Critics say things haven’t changed much

Things, however, haven’t changed as much since the 1960’s as it might appear, according to some critics of the ruling.

Flemming points to Haley and the Legislature’s turning down federal money for expansion of the Medicaid program through Obamacare.

“Anytime you live in a state or country where they would rather turn money down to keep from helping people, then you can’t ask me have we made that kind of progress where we don’t need laws in place for our protection.”

Repeated attempts by Republican state lawmakers to use tax dollars to support private schools is another example cited by Flemming. “They’re trying to dismantle public education,” he said.

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“If that’s happening to us, what do we have and where can we go for protection if not to the Supreme Court?” he asked. “And now if you’re going to get these kind of rulings against us, we don’t stand a chance. It looks like we have to revert back to the 50s and 60s.”

The Greenville NAACP’s executive committee plans to meet today to discuss what steps it can take, including possible legal action, he said.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he contacted the White House and the Department of Justice on Tuesday to urge action.

“The president must take the lead in rallying the Congress to immediately move to legislation to restore voter protection wherever there’s vulnerability, whether it’s the South or in other states,” Jackson told GreenvilleOnline.com. “The president and the attorney general have the power to rally Congress, and they must.

“There is no greater priority than the integrity of our democracy.”

Otherwise, he said he believes “blacks, browns and women will be thrown out of office through gerrymandering rather quickly.”

“Removing federal oversight to protect the votes of those who have been denied it is like removing the troops out of the South after 1877,” the Greenville native and former aide to Martin Luther King said. “It leaves the minority -- an emerging majority -- unprotected.”

South Carolina’s new voter ID law, which Jackson and others see as an attempt to disenfranchise black voters, was cleared by the Supreme Court after the Justice Department objected, which Republican state Sen. Larry Martin of Pickens says is evidence that federal oversight is no longer needed.

“We don’t have the track record of discrimination that our forefathers did,” said Martin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We’ve learned those lessons, not just because of Section 5 but we are living in a different era now.

“We don’t have the same worldview that folks who might have populated the Legislature 50 years ago had when that law was written. I don’t believe we ought to be put under the same restrictions that our grandparents were put under years ago.”

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Martin said when he was deposed during the Voter ID litigation, attorneys asked him why he thought the law was constitutional. He said he replied that lawmakers followed an Indiana law that had been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“And then they looked at me and said, ‘Oh, but South Carolina is different. You come under the Voting Rights Act. Don’t you understand how different you are?’”

Martin said he replied words to the effect that, “We are in the same country, aren’t we?”

“In other words, the law applies differently to me than it does to folks in Indiana and I don’t understand that,” he said. “I thought the equal protection argument won the day long ago.”

The state has taken steps to be compliant to federal law, but the state still is challenged because of what happened decades ago, he said.

“I don’t have a problem with the Voting Rights Act applying to South Carolina but it ought to apply to every other state the same way,” he said. “The idea that in 2013, that we’re uniquely situated to discriminate based on race and that is not happening anywhere else is just absolutely outrageous.”

Former state Sen. Theo Mitchell, who won the Democratic nomination for governor in 1990, said, “I think it’s a step backwards due to a conservative court with insensitive justices.”

He added, “There’s no question about it, those Republicans are going to eat it up. We have a conservative Republican House and Senate that’s going to relish in it because now they can keep minorities and others intimidated from registering to vote and voting.”

Some current state lawmakers had similar misgivings.

Rep. Todd Rutherford, a Columbia lawyer who leads House Democrats, said the decision will show “how mean people really can be.”

“I think it’s going to have an impact on everything we do in this state because so much of what we do relates to race,” he said, “and so much of what the Republicans have done relates to a concerted effort to stop minorities from being able to vote.”

He said handing the issue to Congress won’t help things.

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“They might as well have put it on a children’s playground,” he said. “I don’t think Congress collectively, all the 400-plus members, could ride a bicycle, much less deal with voting issues that are complicated.”

He said racism in the South was “still alive and well” when the Voting Rights Act was written and “is still alive and well now.”

“South Carolina and others, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, have continued to be places that are hostile to African-Americans and their right to vote,” he said.

“Culturally, we are entering a generation that maybe we can do away with the Voting Rights Act. But those people who currently are in power are the same people who needed to be stopped 10 years ago, 15, 20, 30 years ago. Nothing has changed with them. And all this does is open the gates.”

No surprise

Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, an Orangeburg Democrat, said she isn’t surprised by the ruling.

“I had feared that might be the case,” she said. “That is something I hope Congress will take steps to remedy immediately. I can agree on one hand that it does need updating. It’s not just Southern states where these barriers to participation have occurred. But I am still extremely disappointed because I don’t have any faith that this dysfunctional Congress is capable of that review.”

Rep. Bakari Sellers, the Democratic son of civil rights activist Cleveland Sellers, now the president of Voorhees College, said the decision is the “law of the land.”

“The Voting Rights Act was one of the biggest accomplishments of those in my father’s generation,” he said. “For it to be gutted is very disappointing. But you have to pivot and move forward under what is now the law of the land.”

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, assistant Democratic leader in the House, said he wasn’t surprised.

“All one has to do is take a look at the shenanigans that were taking place in the run up to the 2012 elections and you would know there are a lot of jurisdictions in this country that would go to great lengths to hamper and discourage voting participation by people of color,” he said.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what Congress is going to do,” Clyburn said. “I think we ought to move swiftly to correct this decision.”